Package: dpkg
Severity: wishlist

Dear dpkg developers,

Please consider allowing a display of the copyright file of a package
via dpkg. While I am sure you will ask me why this is any different
from doing zcat /usr/share/doc/$pkg/copyright.gz, I am hinting at
something more like the way it is done in RPM:

http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2008-July/042594.html

In essence, this may necessitate machine readable copyright format,
but I think it would be worth taking this forward.

Do inform me if I need to report this elsewhere, or if this has
already been reported elsewhere.

Thank you.

Kumar

reassign 492432 aptitude
thanks

Hi,

The stuff done on RPM is not good enough. Describing the whole package
licensing situation in only a field is not sufficient, that's one of
the reasons we have the copyright file.

Making dpkg output this file while its format is not (yet) standardized,
and there does not seem to be consensus that it will be in the near
future, seems like not that useful, as the tools trying to analyze
such output would only work if it was in a standardized format.

The other problem is that the administrator is allowed (per policy) to
remove anything under /usr/share/doc/, so dpkg will not be able to
always output such information.

I guess a more appropriate place for this would be the front-ends,
in the same way «aptitude changelog foo» shows the changelog, taking it
from a remote repository even w/o needing the package to be installed,
the same could be done with the copyright file (it's even on the same
host). Althought the format is still a problem, and it might make
sense to delay providing such an option until such format is more
wide-spread.

Reassigning, now you might have to convince the aptitude maintainers. :)

regards,
guillem

Dear Guillem and Aptitude maintainers,

I am in agreement with you. It would require a monumental effort in
standardization. Even then, there are several exceptions and
non-standard licenses which we would have to deal with.

True.

Thanks, Guillem, for the patient explanation. I guess this may not
happen in the near future, but I would still request the Aptitude
maintainers to keep this option open, so that somewhere in the future,
we could see such a feature come in. Of course, you guys are in a
better position to judge the issue, but all the same...

Thanks.

Kumar

Since some time the copyright files are available alongside changelogs
on <http://packages.debian.org/changelogs> so this is quite possible to
do now.

A new contributor should be able to pick this up basing their work on
the existing infrastructure for fetching changelogs:

- src/generic/apt/pkg_changelog.cc
- src/generic/apt/download_queue.cc

I suggest to work on the command line interface first, based on:

- src/cmdline/cmdline_changelog.cc

Please contact the development team [1] for further help.

HH

[1] mailto:aptitude-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org

Hi folks, this bug is almost 8 (!) years old. I've started looking into the
implementation to see if I can thro a patch together but wanted to make sure
this is something the aptitude team would still want.

Hi Mike,

Ideally, this would be implemented in libapt directly. It nowadays
sports a pkgAcqChangelog which deals with most of the complexity around
changelogs including the constructing the URI (as different archives
have different storage places and such) [which from a casual look seem
not to be used by aptitude which constructs the URI on its own (for
Debian only)].

A good way to deal with this hence might perhaps be to fully adopt
pkgAcqChangelog in aptitude, mostly copy pkgAcqChangelog and paste as
pkgAcqCopyright in libapt (src:apt) and copy&paste the changelog-code in
aptitude to deal with copyright [Bonuspoints if abstraction is used
instead of copy&paste].

I can't speak for the aptitude team of course, but at least for the apt
team and I would be happy to help on the apt side. If you are interested
feel free to ask me (DonKult), us (deity@lists.debian.org) and/or on IRC
(#debian-apt – where apt & aptitude people hang out together)!


Best regards

David Kalnischkies

Alright, that makes a lot of sense. I'll take a look at libapt and see if
there's a nice way add support for fetching the copyright info without too much
copy/pasting.
I'll definitely drop the irc by when I inevitably have qestions. Thanks!

Greetings.

I'm writing to you because I have a humanitarian request that I believe
could be incredibly impactful. I'm reaching out about the recent
devastating storm that tragically claimed many lives and affected numerous
individuals in Libya, including one of my clients. I would like to discuss
a proposal with you that could enable us to extend a helping hand to these
victims.

Looking forward to discussing this further with you.

Warm regards,
Mrs. Nathalie Herolds

Greetings.

I'm writing to you because I have a humanitarian request that I believe
could be incredibly impactful. I'm reaching out about the recent
devastating storm that tragically claimed many lives and affected numerous
individuals in Libya, including one of my clients. I would like to discuss
a proposal with you that could enable us to extend a helping hand to these
victims.

Looking forward to discussing this further with you.

Warm regards,
Mrs. Nathalie Herolds